


Number the Stars

by puella_peanut



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Historical Hetalia, Holocaust, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 09:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10085210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_peanut/pseuds/puella_peanut
Summary: He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.In Occupied Poland, a former German soldier of the Great War finds himself at risk from both the enemy and his own traitorous self, when he smuggles a Jewish pianist with broken hands out of the Kraków Ghetto and into the attic of his shop.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in 60 themed sentences with exactly 60 words each. Why? I'm a masochist, that's why. Check out the end for notes!

_He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names - Psalms 147:4_

* * *

**1\. lost -** Podgórze is hollow with ghosts, rich with blood of flags raising colors of war to a wind not theirs to breathe. Peace slumbers; now buried under nightmares of bloodletting, cradled in boots of soldiers from foreign streets, persecution nesting in eyes like birds unable to fly away. You know you must act soon if you are to act at all.

**2\. constellations -** His eyes are Aryan, his hair Jewish, and he speaks German as if the language walks unbalanced on his tongue; on stilts, in fear. In daily passing, your fingertips knot their skin at the edges of the wall that segregates him, feeding from stone, grazing on ideas. Time is of essence, and the pianist's hourglass is almost out of sand.

**3\. warning -** The ghetto is an enemy unto itself, encased in battle armor of stone and plaster; breathed to life from the ground up like a cold-blooded plant from the decree of small men in high places. It stands on guard; a government-invested infantry line halving the citizens, while the rampant disease that jails it spreads unchecked throughout Europe like poison gas.

**4\. curfew -** You slip through the brushstrokes of after hours, a man unpainted by the red-hands of civil disobedience; ashes on your skin, him in your eyes. Beyond glass, fingers cross, uncross bridges on his lap, mind carried to places his body has yet to follow. You rap the window; he invites you in on a chide, welcome curtained behind his frown.

 **5\. branding -** Shoulders bend in response to sanctions from another land, shared and distributed among people burdened by patchwork yellow stars. Six points on the lapel, directions beyond control; ousting them to the current administration, some Cain of compasses—but all you can think as candlelight halos on skin, is that you would have preferred to mark him in other ways.

**6\. lullaby -** Security tightens in nooses of shining boots and artillery; the city re-birthed in wombs of propaganda and indoctrination, breeding lies into fear, fear into hatred. An orchestra of gunshots fills in the gaps between the once ivory teeth, music clotting onto his fingers in missed notes and mistakes. You close your eyes, listening; learning by heart the melody of holocaust.

**7\. fire -** His hands are swaddled in shrouds of white; fingers bent in submission, as if genuflecting to the guard who smashed them. The keys of the piano litter the floor like a storm of broken songs; he steps over them, bridging explanations that do not connect the pieces—for all you can hear is rage galloping to crescendos in your blood.

 **8\. habits -** Rosary beads pull through fingers, Hail Marys tangling on holy extension lines to the Lord. St. Joseph's is full where you are empty, prayers spilling over pews, incense anointing heads like smoked halos. The Latin of childhood catechism echoes; translation lost between languages of doubt and anger. You kneel in deference at the alter; your spine bowed, your soul defiant.

**9\. cartographer -** Occupation slips through the lands of bodies strangely. You were fifteen when invasion burrowed under your skin in cannons; mudslung trenches harvesting nightmares from youth. Twenty-three when the shop became yours, eyes marching between story lines not your own; mind collecting dust in the past. Thirty-one when infiltration wore sonatas on fingertips, and sounded like his name on your lips.

**10\. choices -** Outside the world is on fire but you are rising to defy its flag, the thousand years promised setting like sunsets in your eyes. There are ropes for such as you, waiting to lynch necklaces around throats, bullets punctuating bodies like sentences that have condemned. It's a risk you take however, as your mind campaigns, plans charging forward like battlecry.

**11\. stubborn -** You wear no uniform this time; you pick your fights from the dregs of the soldier who once blueprinted your architecture during 1917. You are an army of one, ignoring commanding orders to leave, issued statements, eventual pleas to forget, no weapons or victory in sight; just a man who cannot understand why you are going to war for him.

**12\. persuasion -** He is noble where you are not, refusal dulling his eyes like unpolished jewels. You want to shake him, hoping it will rattle loose the sense dangling somewhere inside. Instead you dress down your voice, stripping it to the bare canvas of begging; on your knees at this altar where he plays judge, jury and executioner of his own fate.

**13\. safe -** It's not much of a jewelry box, the attic: just ribs of wood knitted together above your shop, playing dollhouse to families of dust, junk; occasional neighborly visits from rats. It's the graveyard of your past: tombstones of broken rifles, trench covered youth buried next to toy soldiers—now to be occupied by a man who haunts your soul.

**14\. over -** The jagged gunshots tunneled through the others like minefields bring armistice to his tongue, shell shock to his eyes. Death fluttered past in hands aching his bones to a fitful sleep beyond dawn, blindfolding him to the soldier who committed the deed. Their leftovers hum in warning as you cross, pulling him along; death speaking loudly, your decision louder still.

**15\. passages -** The cobbled-stones nip at your heels as if longing to tear you apart. But secrets need not echo for the world to hear, so you both remove shoes; socks skipping stones, footsteps hushed to mere ripples in the shadow bed of streets. The thick column of dark pillars like a Colosseum; the night pinned by stars that guide your way.

**16\. game -** Strategy: the Holy Bible of soldiers; scripture sunk into marrow the way the bullet sunk your kneecap at Passchendaele. Your rules colonize this meager kingdom of cobwebs: no lights, no movement, no speaking during store hours, no leaving these four corners. He nods in all the right places while an ache creaks the gaps where your heart does not beat.

**17\. unravel -** That night, you slowly unwind the bandages and his resistance falls away as well. His hands are splintered bones, knuckles swollen like rosary beads under the mosaic blues and purples that scour his skin like stained-glass. His fingers are colored like the windows of Catholic Churches, his touch as cold as the prayers that haven't left your mouth in years.

**18\. memory -** The woman was old; twisted and bent like a gnarled tree, coins falling from the branches of withered fingers. The book secondhand; notes rushed, cluttering pages played to ruin; sighing out of tune as you swaddled it in brown paper. Birthday gift for the grandson who would one day grow up to linger in attics, composing your life to his.

**19\. coats -** You were there when the war blew into Poland, tanks and knotted laws riding metallic winds. There when they turned on the stars, cloth burning hollows into lives like a thousand pinpricks. Now you remain, thrown out of your old life into a new one; finding the fit tight, movements controlled. Careful least the seams split and your secrets leak.

**20\. sovereignty -** He held kingdoms once, in those eyes colored like royalty. Before the war dethroned him, usurped him to the streets; trading his crown for a patchwork star, his musical rule for silence playing across broken bones. Now he lives among the clutter of attics, lost prince without a country. His knuckles kissed by bruises, he rules nothing but your heart.  
**  
****21\. irony -** The soldier's voice is like gauze; rushing to bind the ugliness of his words as if to soften their impact, though their wounds still seep through the cloth, infecting your temper like disease. Triumph bleeds through small talk walls; he speaks of ridding the land of vermin, unaware that your store bottles up resistance in lies and attic bound secrets.

**22\. selfish -** A while later, the ghetto breaks open—walls halved, souls scooped out with bayonets. Screams float on air, streets rising like waves under boots storming them; gunshots and smoke waltzing vendettas across the window's curtain. War has reshaped people like clay, its kiln burning them—but you thank it nonetheless for delivering his trembling body into your arms.

**23\. breathe -** There are lights in the clouds, night blotted out by wars flying among the stars, the fabric of sky ripped by silver wings. Below, buildings shiver; swaying in the breath of murder that blows the country apart and upstairs in the attic, your hand navigates to his in the tunnel of darkness that surrounds you. Only your eyes are alive.

**24\. compensation -** War makes a strange master, as it both destroys and creates in its wake. Victory, if it comes, stands on shoulders of sacrifice and gain. You see this familiar compromise playing on the repertoire of his body in the new softness of eyes, the hard press of jaw. Your minds pinned with the weight of medals from two different wars.

**25\. god -** His Yiddish is ground down under the booted heel of whispers, words thin as blades of grass and trampled down much the same. Apprehension thickens his recitations to congealment; the syllables are stirred with lead, weighing on his tongue like synagogues of steel. He ushers his upbringing forwards on a hushed cavalry of faith, while you listen and do not believe.

**26\. calligraphy -** When you were a child, your pocketknife scribbled alphabets into trees, the billboards of the forest; penpals of idle blades walking tall on several skinny lines that bore the weight of life in your name. Now, as history dips its pen into the spilled inkpot of souls, you write his survival between the lines, letters read by none but yourself.

**27\. flavor -** Fingers creak like unoiled hinges as he releases the cup—chipped of course—like most things nowadays. The tea looks painfully weak, hardly more than slow pulled water from the pump; an unhappy marriage of overused leaves bought by miserly ration coupons. Sugar exists now only in your memories, but you steal a sip, finding him sweet on your tongue.

**28\. theaters -** The world is a circus, countries wearing the painted face of clowns, juggling the children of politics in either hand. The stage set by ringmasters dressed as governments, infantry storming routines to the cadence of war; orchestrated maneuvers waltzed to bullets and bombardment. The cost is high but the audience watches on while backstage, you shelter him in your wings.

**29\. patches -** Necessity's the mother of invention, but it's war rustling the feathers of magpie ingenuity in the overcoat cut down to size, living hemmed in by stitched falsehoods, scissored deception; his cloth trimmed to fit the jacket of war. If only the future could be tailored, you muse as you sew; altered to certainty—for he wears life's colors so well.  
**  
****30\. winter -** Cold parts the tapestry of air. The attic smokes in foggy ghosts resting at the outskirts of mouths, frosty visitors line the edges of breaths, the chill making your knee snap like the bullet that cracked it. There are benefits to this weather however; namely, one blanket for two and slowly covering bent, stiff fingers with your old leather gloves.

**31\. fairytales -** Once upon a time are lullabies soothing fevered brows, tow-haired knights riding rocking horses across lands of childhood; untold stories rusting in bodies uncorked on battlefields and uniforms sewn in the fabric of untameable blood. It's loneliness spread thick behind bookshop countertops and bachelor living—all while bespectacled boys grow up climbing the rungs of the ladder to your heart.

**32.** **bookkeeping -** History is a strange thing, a social construct built on bodies of loss, paving the road of futures. You stand on layers of generations, you walk on the lives of others; a day to come when your story turns over for the next chapter of time, though for now—you sit by his side, writing yourself into his album's pages.

**33\. orchestra -** Do his hands feel naked without music coating them, do they starve without songs to press into life? Does he miss dipping touches into melodies, stirring notes around until sound plays correctly? You wonder to yourself while beside you, crooked fingers trace sheetmusic, pages turning like metronome. He breaks rhythm once, with grateful thanks and your tempo spills over, breathless.

**34\. atavism -** Bombs roll across skies, unfurled like chariots of fire; riding the cosmos like man made shooting stars. Night blooms in flowers of flame close to the window; you could pluck a bouquet from its savage garden while the torch swallows your cigarette to ash. But your fingers burn instead, watching mankind mold history from the beasts residing in its soul.

**35\. carousel -** At night you close your eyes, unshot bullets echoing through the armor of skin, chinks of insomnia. Hours dripping on tightropes of worry, sidling on the blank rounds between the final blow of Russian roulette. Foreign fingers are poised on the trigger of his life, your days held in the ever narrowing space between the noose of belief and suspicion. 

**36\. dust -** The city is mashed to the ground, a pulp of grey porridge scraped through the teeth of footsteps; you live in a land swallowed by war, regurgitated in rubble. Bits of houses scuff boots and get caught in fingernails of floorboards; some souvenir pebbles of destruction. Your customers carrying home in bits and pieces; you carrying home in your attic.

**37\. masquerade -** Somewhere, his shadow has spilled over the brim of hiding, the scent of his life bringing the hounds calling to your door. Soldiers wade into your secrets, barking demands and you rearrange your voice to monastic tones; nerves rattling like the tin of magazines rolling under your skin in armies of goosebumps. Boots press the stairs; will your barricade hold?

**38\. quiet -** Upstairs, flashlight wanders the room, pulling apart the vertebrae of wood; spine holding the walls together. You can only hope it will not absorb the trickle of fear the dam built of paper skin and rustling bones can hardly contain. Footsteps of blood pound your ears, stomping sound. Your eyes close; fireworks of yellow stars exploding across fields of eyelids.

**39\. religion -** The soldiers leave empty handed and he unfolds from the trunk, peeling off your childhood memories, pieces of toy train derailing to the floor. Suspenders slip off shoulders, shirt loose at hangers of bone. They say old habits die hard—it must be true, for you rush to him like benediction, his name shaped like a prayer at your lips.

**40\. clocks -** Time is the spine of existence, years hung like a gathering of scarecrows on its frame. Days pulled by the puppet strings of hours, lives dangling like pendulums in the hourglasses of flesh and bone. Downstairs in the weeks that follow, the shop ticks on monotonously while in the attic, he does not grow older—only more aware of himself.

**41\. blood -** Rain taps at the roof like paws of a thousand mice running up a storm. The attic is illuminated in peels of lightening that rumble thunder over your skin in trills of damp music, while several hours worth of moldy, black market potatoes jump to the floor as he reaches for your cut cheek; eyes hungrier than you've ever seen. **  
**

****42\. value -**** The only customers who drop occasionally by the shop anymore are soldiers and they are not the paying kind. Money is scarcer than hen’s teeth, contents of the store trickling away; slow drained to drought in the weekly barter for food, stale crumbs from the banquet of conflict. War has bankrupted your business, looted you out from everything—but him. 

****43\. transmission -**** The radio throbs; voices flicker as if they are flames in the winds of static that blow across the lines. Countries and languages are braided like twin wires of forbidden DNA spiraling rebellion into your muted flesh like corkscrews. You both lean over the box; ears orbiting the drumlines of resistance, the channels of his eyes in tune with yours. ** **  
** **  
**44**. **different -** The sky wrinkles after bombardment, wringing out the last drops of explosions from its folds. Wind combs through veins of smoke, expelling from its lungs, remaining splinters of rifles and things like this are not usually shared between men as bitter war consumes earth outside, but as you find his mouth again, you wonder if this is not somehow better. **  
**

**45\. navigation -** You've walked trails of childhood played at pianos, keys teaching music to waiting fingers; lanes of bookshop visits, voice creaking on roads of growing up. Uphill climbs over walls, restrained footing across attic floorboards. For it seems that whatever compass life is made of, yours and his have long been spinning to the same direction—now pointing at each other.

**46\. fools -** Fear pulls fury from the pit of your stomach to hang your throat in a cluttered noose of outraged words, seeing him downstairs during store hours. Above, air-raid sirens continue ushering a thunderous fleet of bombs across the beleaguered skies; below, crooked fingers whisper relief at safety along your jawline while between you, anger digs its grave in ragged arms.

**47\. promises -** The attic meanders from the direction of war to pathways of night floating on skin unbuttoned from the hold of fabric; sinuous belts of moonlight walking the curve of arched spine, tilt of slender neck; bent fingers pressed against unsteady heartbeats, spectacles disposed from waiting eyes brimming over them, and whispers on breathless lips to be as quiet as possible.  ****_**  
**_

**48\. conversations -** Bodies teach in many dialects: from siren songs of music tutored by slim fingers caressing fat chords, sharp politics from mouths cut deceptively soft for hard discourse, to patience in repeated lessons from years of black lashed glances. Now you're being taught again, up to your knees in flesh and bone—learning to master the art of speaking without words.

**49\. swansong -** Afterwards, your thoughts climb up the winding silk of longing, releasing its hold from the knots of want. You had only yearning to grasp onto for so many years, fearing those frequent climbs into wishful thinking would fray the line to him. Now you can let them unravel, unwind—for your desire lies slumbering in your arms. Breathing. Tangible. Real.

**50.** ** **bazaar -**** Fighting continues to cut notches into life, days turning sideways on the conveyor belt of time. War sells living for many things: lives blotted in pursuit of systems cut on cloth, persecution sewn by political needles. You bid on him as he fell, shooting star wished on for years tumbling into your arms— now bought to keep for you alone.

**51\. duty -** Hunger nips like a pack of bloodhounds by the hour, circulating around the clockwork of ravenousness; filling the empty larder of echoing stomachs with a hefty, useless stock of inedible daydreams. Flesh unwinds in long threads of starvation from the spools of bone, bodies fed only by malnourishment. You now go on if not for victory, than for each other.  **  
**

**52.** **oedipus -** The womb of politics births war, crawls it into life on speeches, governments strangled by flags of ambition; walks it on legs marching to deception. It marries conscription; countries battle bound to weeks in matching bands of annihilation, deceptive ties that bind. Old age, the incurable disease of defeat, shakes its feeble cane of pride; it won't be long, now.  
**  
****53\. entropy -** The concluding hours are the coldest, impatience unpinning the last of maneuvers in bitten nails, eyes searching for victory that has yet to visit the streets though its aeroplanes circulate the skies like vultures wheeling near defeat. The end quivers; finale struck just out of hearing while under the lattice work of attic, war withers; by his side, you wait. **  
**

**54.** **finale -** Like a thief, war pickpockets holes in living, stealing youth from trenches or faultlines of fabric stars. It plunders life, ransacking it to skeletons of existence, remains of the day filling in gaps conflict has gorged out and you stand speechless side by side; looking out at six years' worth of lifetimes ending not with a bang—but a whimper. 

**55\. senses -** Liberation sounds voices of declaration in accents of soldiers; it's seen in signatures of defeat, flourishes of foreign boots upon familiar ground. Countries breathing in air unbroken by the scent of battle; tasting peacetime, that fickle harvest of surrender—finding the flavor bittersweet. And he touches it barefoot one morning; walking outside for the first time in over two years.

**56\. fate -** Your dreams are littered with corpses, canopies of ribwork tugging the last of life up through emaciated frames, faces all hollows, all defeat. Somewhere both far and near, bodies burn and your eyes are stung open—awakening in darkness to hold him tighter, your fingers frantically tracing the column of slender, pale forearm where skin remains unmarked by ink-stained ideologies.

**57\. polyglot -** You speak several languages of war: the sudden, rapid tongue of conscription; battle—a metallic, smoke infused dialect. The wet, lyrical prose of killing, the hoarse slang of bullet-holed kneecaps—shell shock; a guttural speech. You were taught jagged, splintered vernacular at tips of broken fingers; now you're learning the unsteady double-talk of peacetime in two lexicons battling for supremacy.

**58.** ** **kingdoms -**** Another day, another war. The world spins not on the axis of rationality, but on a Babylon of deception, new tower arising from the pastimes of madness; air cold with division; victory tinged with defeat.  Between turns of treaties, players line up, set to maneuver this political chessboard while two spaces remain non-conscripted; you'll not be pawns in these games.

**59.** **journey -** Lives were once stuffed into gears of conscription, war wheeled to minds long after battles ended; once hushed under persecuted yellow stars, layers of attics built upon lies. Now they're peeled from the shop; packed between newspapers, folded away in two battered suitcases, a trunk. The building sealed in the slumber of past; the future unwrapped between you, him. Tomorrow.

**60\. found -** Podgórze is hollow with ghosts, rich with blood of flags raising colors of war to a wind not theirs to breathe. Peace slumbers; now buried between foreign accents, cradled in opposing flags when you lock shop forever, slipping the key into his pocket, him into your arms.

You ask, "Ready, Roderich?"

And he smiles, cups your cheek.

"Gilbert," he says. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. and 60. - Podgórze is a district in the former capital of Poland, Kraków.
> 
> 2\. and 25. - A little over 10% of Jews in Poland actually spoke Polish (learning the language was forbidden by Jewish law). About 80% spoke Yiddish as their first language and 10% or so included Hebrew as another spoken/first language which created hatred between Poles and Jews, making anti-Semitism popular from all sides, including government and the Catholic Church (though at the same time, the Church helped the Jews...contradictory!). However, German/Austrian-born Jews spoke German as their first language.
> 
> 3\. - The ghetto is of course, the famous Kraków Ghetto, one of five built by Nazi Germany (largest being the Warsaw Ghetto) and was formally established March 3rd, 1941 and surrounded by walls separating it from the rest of the city. From 1941, Jews were forcefully stuffed in there like sardines. If you couldn't find an already over-packed residence/room to share, you just had to stave on the streets.
> 
> 4\. - It was difficult, but people still slipped in and out of the ghetto, especially for instance, social workers/religious/resistance/others. Dozens of recipients of the Righteous among the Nations award were part of these Kraków groups. By nationality, Poles rescued the most Jews though many on both sides died/were murdered during these attempts and the Poles/Jews that survived WW2 and made the mistake of going east...were sent to camps (gulag) in Siberia. Despite efforts, 90% of Polish Jews perished during the Holocaust.
> 
> 5\. - In November 1939 in Poland, all Jews 12 and older had to wear armbands/Star of David patches for identification. Not a very popular fashion statement.
> 
> 8\. - St. Joseph's was/is a historic (and gorgeous) Roman Catholic church in Podgórze.
> 
> 10\. - To put it nicely, helping Jews was...not encouraged.
> 
> 15\. - It was not easy, but people still smuggled Jews out of the ghetto, especially children/babies. Irena Sendler for instance, saved about 2500 Jewish children before she was caught and brutally tortured by the Gestapo. Barely any of those children's parents survived.
> 
> 16\. - The Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) was a major campaign of WW1 1917 (British Empire, France, Belgium vs. the German Empire). It was utterly horrific—especially thanks to the weather which pretty much slow-drowned soldiers in suffocating mud—and one of the most devastating battles of WW1, with massive causalities on all sides and, to this day, a whole lotta denial.
> 
> 22\. and 23. - The final liquidation of the ghetto occurred between the 13th and 14th of March 1943, under the command of SS Amon Göth. The remaining Jews were either killed, sent to Auschwitz or Göth's hell-on-earth Płaszów labor/concentration camp. If you want to see a great depiction of this scene/life at camp, just watch Schindler's List—there is a long segment of the ghetto's liquidation for instance, and Ralph Fiennes' performance as Göth is just...phenomenal.
> 
> 37., 38. and 39. - Homes were susceptible to arbitrary searches for Jews at any hour, any day. This became even more extreme during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The SS made for some really unwelcome visitors.
> 
> 43\. - You'd be surprised at the popularity of illegal radio broadcasts from forbidden channels around occupied-Europe (BBC, Voice of America, Radio Moscow, the Swiss Beromünster etc.)! Everyone denied it, but everyone listened. Best kept open secret with a healthy serving of propaganda and exaggeration from all stations, especially Radio Moscow which started every broadcast with the cheerful, "Supreme Death to the German Invaders!"
> 
> 52\. - Oedipus was the man who answered the Sphinx's famous riddle.
> 
> 54\. - "...bang but a whimper..." referring to the poem, 'The Hollow Men' by T.S Elliot. And if you lived in Europe, WW2 lasted six years.
> 
> 55\. - The Vistula–Oder Offensive as carried out by the Soviet Union liberated Kraków (and other places) between January - February 1945. Poland's liberation unfortunately came with the heavy costs of brutal rapes, murder, and just horrible treatment all around. Just look up Soviet War Crimes in general, or Poland's history with Russia before/after WW2. Poland truly suffered before, during and after WW2.
> 
> 59\. - It was best to leave when you had the chance, considering the Red Army/Soviet Union was set to control Poland during the Cold War. During the latter stages of WW2/aftermath (between 1944 - 1950), ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe (Flight and Expulsion of Germans), and fled to Allied-occupied Germany or Austria. Many left and emigrated to America and other countries. The numbers vary, but the disputed death toll is between 500,000 to over two million.


End file.
